Spammers haven't adapted to greylisting yet? I figured by now they'd all
be either following the SMTP rules or sending mail through the big services.
Usually the phishers seem to come from gmail or yahoo.

This week I realized that I had at some point changed my DNS server to 8.8.8.8
which made SURBL stop working. Fixing that helped a lot. I also installed
Pyzor which seems to have made a dent also. Should I install Razor2 along
with it? Is there a difference?

I'm open to greylisting but of course that means I'd have to write my own
implementation of it. Sure, I could put a lot of off-the-shelf spam filters
in front of Citadel but I use all of our incoming email as a nonstop test
of Citadel's MTA.

I did. Once in a while I go around and clean up online presences that I'm
not using anymore. Ever since that terrorist tried to get me fired from my
job in 2010 I've been careful about what I leave lying around on the 'net.

I use an app to automatically delete anything I post to Twitter after one
week.

I don't use fecesbook at all. (Although I do have an account with a fake
name, just to get past the hitlerwall when someone posts a link that I want
to read.)

When I see that I have an account that I'm no longer using, I close it.
(Exception: my 4-digit Slashdot ID might come in handy someday.)

And then there's Disqus, which seems to be everywhere these days. Every
now and then I abandon my account and start over with a new name.

At the time, for some odd reason, I thought you could only use Hangouts if you had Google Plus, so I joined. I wanted to have video calls. I think Google is in the process of getting rid of hangouts. in favor of their apps.

You would think Google Location, once known as Google Latitude would be part of Google Maps. This is not the case, you need G+ to share locations on a map. When traveling my family does use location services.

There are ways to text/SMS your location but that is only at the time the message is sent. I wish Google would move location to maps...where it belongs.

I still don't see any practical application for it other than sexting, which
by itself probably can't carry the company.

Nevertheless, they are doing an IPO next week, with the company supposedly
valued at $22 billion (USD). That seems excessive for a company with a very
narrow user demographic and not a whole lot of revenue.

Snapchat is to make the chicks feel secure enough so they post nekid pics. And then you take a screenshot, or if you are old school, photograph your phone with another phone. Teens are stupid assholes.

Well well well. All hell is breaking loose right now. It's being reported
in the news as an "Amazon outage" and I'm fine with Amazon's reputation taking
a hit, but I think it might actually be impacting more than just them. But
let's call it an Amazon outage because I like that. That'll teach people
not to trust a bookstore to provide IT services.

more than just them. But let's call it an Amazon outage because I like

that. That'll teach people not to trust a bookstore to provide IT
services.

More importantly, it'll drive home the point that cloud is no substitute
for locally managed infrastructure. I have no beef with AWS, but I find the
very concept of cloud itself every bit as annoying as it is useful. Too many
people rely too heavily on it.

It's not as unreliable as all that, in particular if your team is not Very
Good, they will somewhat inevitably do much worse than AWS's team in terms
of keeping locally managed infrastructure reliably working.

So, what do you do?
* design a fault-tolerant application stack and distribute it across multiple
AWS regions. Anybody who did that, and did it well, survived yesterday's outage
without a hiccup. My workplace isn't nearly there, but we weren't disrupted
too too badly because we don't rely on S3 for anything central.

Locally managed hardware will fail. Hardware will go kaput, and on any sufficiently
large server farm this will happen with distressing regularity. The advantages
of AWS are *tremendous* in terms of staff you don't have to employ and the
ability to requisition new hardware (to scale up, to deploy new services,
or to replace failed hardware) nearly instantaneously.

Nobody is forcing you to rely on S3 either, you could just use the core EC2
instances.